Content-centric routing for the autonomic networks

In this paper, we address the problem of content routing in the context of the Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) project. The general aim of the ANA project is to provide an innovative communication framework that helps to surpass the current IP limitations in an heterogeneous networking environment and provide autonomicity to the management of these environments. A flexible and dynamic framework that allows the integration of newly designed and adapted communication protocols is already proposed and its prototyping phase is ongoing. Many efforts are deployed in order to demonstrate its feasibility and its benefits. As the content distribution has been shown as one of the most popular services of the current networks, we chosed to study the feasibility of content routing using the ANA framework. Specifically, we use a filtering mechanism to forward client requests for a content towards the most relevant content registered in the network. We use also an optimisation process in order to determinate a limited set of neighbours to which the received requests has to be forwarded in order to find the matching content. Our protocol is designed in a modular way and its functionalities are decomposed in small blocks that can be configured and tested separately.